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Actually, the three of us who made
"Fever Pitch" -- writer, director and
producer -- got a development deal with
Miramax, and this will be the first film
to come out of that. It's about an
American band in the U.K. where the lead
singer walks out halfway through and
ends up in a small seaside town. The
other one is a sort of gimmicky romantic
comedy. I always liked those films like
"Big" and "Groundhog Day" and I wanted
to try one myself. At the moment I'm
developing that with John Madden, who
directed "Shakespeare in Love," but he's
got loads of things on the go. I don't
know if he'd end up directing it, but
he's helping me with the script every
couple of months. Also Today "High Fidelity" Does writing a screenplay feel like taking a break from your real job? Sort of. I really enjoyed doing "Fever Pitch" and I really enjoyed working with people. It occurred to me that I'm really too sociable to want to sit on my own in a room for two years, which is what you do when you write a book. I've got a couple of things on the go right now. Original screenplays. "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy" are both going to be films -- well you know "High Fidelity" is coming out soon -- I didn't do the screenplay for that. So the last year has been spent doing drafts of two different screenplays which are very different from each other. You created some dead-on depictions of London males, especially with "High Fidelity." Do you find people saying that to you when you're doing readings in America? No, not really. Englishness doesn't really seem to come into it. "High Fidelity," for example, works for any Western country because there are guys everywhere who are obsessed with popular music. In Scandinavia the books have done well, Italy the same, Germany very well and Spain not at all. I wonder if there's something about Catholic countries where a lot of people still live with their mums and stuff and I'm not sure if they get it; the endless chopping and changing of relationships, the agonizing over what you're doing with your life. I think paradoxically they've worked so well here because we are more American in that way and we do agonize that much more over life. Also, all my input is American. I only read American novels, I only watch American television. What American writers do you admire? My inspiration was Anne Tyler. I'm very different from her, but I think she's fantastic. It's that simplicity, where there seems to be bottomless intelligence and yet they don't exclude. I think for me, what's wrong with more or less all English fiction, to be clever means to be erudite and to express your vocabulary and it alienates more or less everybody. They have tiny book sales and there's this little literary circle in Britain which is basically for themselves and doesn't impinge upon the outside world at all. What the fuck's that? The good American writers don't exclude in that way. Who else do you read? There's a short story writer called Lorrie Moore who I think is great, Tobias Wolff ... "This Boy's Life" was a big book for me before I wrote "Fever Pitch." Part of it also comes from teaching. You're looking around for stuff to give to kids that takes them places, is intelligent and that they can also comprehend. That's why in English schools even today people read Hemingway and Steinbeck all the time, "Of Mice and Men," Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye." You don't feel you're being patronized by the vocabulary of the characters because the ideas and relationships behind it are extremely complex, yet the language itself is simple, so any kid can grasp what's going on in those books. Are you happy with the way your books have been received? None of the books have had really bad reviews, but I think I'm still viewed by the "establishment" with some suspicion. Why's that? Well, none of the books have been up for a literary prize. I don't feel chippy about it at all, but looking at it dispassionately I think that "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy" were better books than some which ended up on short lists. Why do you think that is? I think we have a problem with jokes in literature. If you have jokes, it's not literature. How many funny books have won the Booker Prize? I can't remember how this came up, but I think it was the year "High Fidelity" came out and one of the judges was asked why "High Fidelity" and a couple of other books weren't on the list, and she said, "I think people are confusing the best book with the best read." I appreciate you can have a difference but I'll tell you, you can't have a good book that isn't a good read. If it's not a good read, it's a bad book. Do you think fiction should be without geography? Oh no, I think fiction should certainly have a set geography. I think something's gone wrong somewhere if a book works for every single audience everywhere in the world. I don't think I'm writing about Britain, but a very precise class of people who could exist in four or five European countries. They're metropolitan books, they're written about places where there are lots of record shops, where there are lots of people who don't know what to do with their lives and people who drift from relationship to relationship.
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